Immunization Program Management

As the FDA prepares to take a more active role in the oversight of genetic tests, the agency is finding itself in unfamiliar territory: regulating software.

In the past, reviewing new diagnostics rarely involved stepping far outside the wet lab. Tests might involve finding a pathogen under the microscope, or detecting an analyte through a chemical reaction in a test tube: simple yes or no questions that just had to be checked to make sure they reliably gave the right answers.

Conceived in January 2014 by Ruchit Nagar, Ife Omiwole, Teja Padma and Leen van Besien in Joe Zinter and Bo Hopkins' class on Appropriate Technology in the Developing World, at Yale University, US, the Khushi Baby prototype of a bracelet that stored medical data won the $25,000 Thorne Prize in April 2014. By December 2014, Khushi Baby had raised around $31,500 on crowd-funding website kickstarter, to pilot its concept in the real world. The first half of 2015 was spent on research. "The goal was to understand the people we are helping, not just dump technology," explains Ruchit.

THREE days ago, the Minister for Health and Social Welfare Dr Seif Rashid broke bad news, as he informed the media that eight people had died and more than 200 were admitted to hospitals in two weeks since cholera broke out in Morogoro and Dar es Salaam regions.

We should remember that the outbreak was first announced in Dar es Salaam on August 15 this year and two days later some cholera cases were reported in Morogoro Region.

When it comes to a vaccine to prevent cholera, one dose may be as good as two. That is the finding of a new study whose authors say the strategy would make a new vaccine that is in short supply go further.

The World Health Organization is stockpiling 2 million doses of a recently licensed oral cholera vaccine to prevent the severe diarrheal illness.

An estimated 1.4 billion people around the world, according to the WHO, are at risk for contracting the water-borne illness, making the stockpile woefully inadequate to meet the need.

The NIAID may have posted 94% efficacy in mice for its investigational "universal" flu vaccine, but The Scripps Research Institute and partner Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) are hot on its heels. Scripps announced Monday that its most advanced candidate fully protected mice in a lethal challenge. They also conducted a sublethal challenge, where the vaccine reduced fever in monkeys.

When you mention innovation, most people immediately think of the latest app that tracks daily life with pinpoint precision, or costly new technologies like Google Glass that just a decade ago would have been considered impossible.

Vaccination campaigns that use a single dose of oral cholera vaccine (OCV) may be able to prevent more deaths than the standard two-dose campaign, according to a modeling study published online August 25 in PLOS Medicine. Such a strategy may be especially important when vaccine supplies are limited or when an outbreak is characterized by complex logistics.

In addition to his role as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Frieden is Chair of the Polio Oversight Board. The letter, published July 31, 2015, outlines successes of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and action items moving beyond the midterm review.

The reluctance of some parents to vaccinate their children in the U.S. has been in the spotlight this year, with a measles outbreak at Disneyland and the California government striking down exemptions to vaccination requirements for children. But the WHO says that vaccine hesitancy is a worldwide problem.